Dance in a Year
danceinayear.com
danceinayear.com
This. Too often we hyperbolize the achievement at the expense of the work. Important to realize and appreciate that no one backs into success accidentally.
I don't practice every day because I'm disciplined. I practice every day because I'm obsessed. I love dancing and my body craves it. If I didn't have this raw hunger, there's no way I would've had the discipline to practice every day.
This raw hunger is the part you can't fake. You might think you want something, but once you take a few steps toward it, you lose your drive. The trick seems to be connecting with a deep-down genuine intuitive desire and going with it. Once you're on that train, it's hard to imagine not walking the path towards your goal every day. More interesting than how to walk the path, for me, is how to find genuine hunger inside yourself...
Passion is something that has been coming up in job interviews lately. Recruiters and managers keep saying "Your technical skills are great, but we didn't think you were passionate enough" and asking "What is it that really drives you?".
After spending my teens and 20s learning to accept that I can't have what I want, I'm having it thrust in front of me with people asking why I don't act like I want it.
I get bored. I genuinely feel that there's no activity or occupation I can remain passionate about for more than a couple of years at most.
People assume I must be epic smart when they hear I work for google. The reality is I'm just obsessed.
I often say this to my guys whenever they ask me how I'm able to write code so fast and elegantly. Back story, I'm much younger than they are (29 as opposed to 35+). I was decent at writing software, but still wasn't that great. I'm a lot better than I am two years ago, but it was the result of learning little things everyday.
There's a fundamental to doing very well at something.
1) Know where you want to go 2) Spending time with your goal
Its exactly like a kid who wants to be a pro baseball player. He just doesn't think he can do it. He has posters of his favorite player in his room. Has his favorite team's hat on. Never leaves home with out a ball and a glove. Learns the lingo. Mimicks his favorite players' batting stance and throwing motion (on and off the field). Looks up stats. Looks up tutorials and common practices (for in game and for training). Oh and watches the games.
Its all about putting yourself in that world. A lady in a recent TED talk mentioned that you should "Fake it until you become it", not "Fake it until you make it". Its the embodiment. If you want to be great at dance, just start dancing. Same for sports, politics, medicine. ANYTHING! Spend time in your chosen field, even if its for 10mins a day. You'd be surprise how much you'd grown.
Many people cannot get out of their daily routine. So they are experts of just living. But one can only imagine how amazing it is to change things up. A whole new world opens up. And to me, that's fantastic!
I imagine that everyone has to decide specifically where they want to improve and figure out how to work precisely on that, but I would be interested to hear what exactly has worked for you?
1) On the job full stack developing (by force). I had no choice really. All the other developers left leaving me as the loan developer. At that time I thought of ... a) Leaving the organization myself - Since my skill level wasn't that great (Only thing I knew was how to build web pages with Microsoft's VS tools) I would've became a junior developer somewhere else. Or worse, went back to help desk. I easily passed on that idea.
b) Learning all there is about the current environment that I'm developing on at work. This was tough especially since I was the only developer and working as a help desk tech. To do so I had to go through a lot of sleepless nights and hair pulling to deliver the product. I also showed up on the weekend at my office to finish up projects even though I didn't get paid for that work. I also had to really pinpoint the things I was afraid of (e.g. taking on tough tasks, JavaScript, asp.net 4.0, setting up databases, deploying systems in different environments, documentation, reading other people's code, reading/using open source software, etc.). It sounds silly to me now, but before that decision I really didn't want to deal with the pain of learning that stuff (and was glad to let the senior guys deal with).
This ended up not only helping me skill wise, but helping the organization that I work with. I'm able to develop software very quickly and (most importantly) correctly. Not only that but with these new skills, I am able to correct a lot of outstanding problems as well as build applications much more robustly. Its amazing what I've learned in the past 2 years just by surrounding myself in this field.
I've always wanted to start a business, and you don't do that just by thinking about it. You have to "put your nose to the grindstone". Now you don't have to go all out like I did. I would suggest to do #2 on my list. Think of a project (or join mines lol) and get yourself into some trouble with it (and you will :D). Think through it, and overcome. Trust me you're a lot smarter than you think, but it does take some work. Some "blood, sweat, and tears".
The good thing to know is that you are not alone. There are other people out there going through the same thing. The ones who are good and efficient are usually willing to help. All you have to do is ask.
(sorry for the long post)
Oh, come on. Enough with the personal development/startup advice bullshit habit of redefining every word to make a point.
Especially when two lines of text later you can read: "If you practice something every day, you're guaranteed to get good at it."
Obsession is a mental activity that consumes people. Discipline to act on this obsession often translate into improvement in the physical world but obsession and motivation alone don't make it. Discipline which brings continuous repeat of the activity is the source of improvement.
Nice story though :)
In this video you see more than just learning to dance for example, you see someone going from being afraid to fully express herself to purposefully giving everything she's got in the moment; a very powerful skill to have.
I recently started a writing course for example and I've been finding parallels between writing and coding that've been incredibly helpful in starting to do persuasive copy in my startup.
But this seems good too.
EDIT: upon reading this again I realise it's a pretty worthless and stupid thing to say, but I can't really delete it now because someone's replied. Sorry people.
The secret of success is to complete a single simple task on a daily basis.
I'm a little concerned though because I'm about to go on a trip where I won't be able to work on it for 5 days. I hope I don't come back from the trip and lose all interest.
Anything you dedicate around a year on, you'll get good at.
- Calories, overall, are mostly the only thing that matters. Lose weight? Less calories than your maintenance calories. Gain? Eat more above maintenance.
- Lifting weights is the most efficient way of losing weight or building muscle because you have an equal amount of resistance every workout. If you run, you can run 10km one week, 15 the next, and so on and so on. With lifting, its (mostly) the same workout, but the weight increases, so the intensity is always the same.
- Lifting, sleeping correctly, and eating really well will create a beautiful trifecta in your life. You don't get irritated, you're crazy confident, you love yourself, it helps SO much with depression, you are more focus and aware. Life is just better, you genuinely love life.
Every day I wake up BURSTING out of my bed with energy. None of that grogginess.
I basically just did powerlifting, (3 days a week with deadlifts, bench, squat, and technical weightlifting for fun like powercleans, cleans, front squats, clean and jerks).
However, I can't run more than a kilometer.
One question though... Doesn't your theory of "Just add weight" apply to running too? Instead of weight, you add speed. So if 10km over three 25 minute workouts gets too easy, then run 11 in the same time. Then 12... Then 13... Keep the target intensity (heart rate) the same. Similar applies to biking, swimming, incline walking, or any other cardio activity.
It's my view that when you're dancing, I mean really dancing, everything else just fades away. It's just you, the music, and if it's a partner dance, your partner. It's practically a form of meditation. Probably one of the ultimate cures for depression.
So I second your recommendation of starting to dance. And I recommend Boogie Woogie. It's a fun dance with a lot of moving and playing. Look up Torbjørn and Susanne on YouTube, the World Champions.
Michael Jordan, on the other hand, reached a 3 handicap in far fewer hours while still playing basketball professionally. Talent matters.
But don't worry, the 10k hours rule is certainly in effect buy it really does not take a full year to get great results and have fun, just dance anywhere you can! Dance like no one is watching. Just Dance.
"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."
I found the other part to be equally true:
"And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.""
Our body/brain needs its learning time. You can't rush things. But you can't force things either. If repeating stuff every day feels like a chore, you should try to find other way to do it. Like learning computer stuff: from a book, a blog post, experimenting with random code from Github.
When the thing you are trying to learn becomes something you can't feel like not doing, learning will happen without consious effort. Variety and interest are hard to conjure if you fail all the time or your resistance to change (be it in strength or memory) is great, but finding a different tack on things can make things easy again.
Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing and let things lie for a bit. When you have a goal, you move closer to it just by it being there. Measuring your progress externally (like this video, bugging friends to read your stuff, pull requests to open source projects) helps you learn from mistakes. Mistakes are better way to progress, since I can easily analyze them as opposed to success: what I did do to succeed?
Name-dropping only Lift does seem slightly conspicuous because it's so specific and practical, it doesn't fit with the more general self-help motivational stuff in the rest of the page.
I took a break from C++ for years.
I wanted to write a video game.
So I started everyday doing something in C++ on the game and I am now a few months into it and I NEED to work on it everyday.
Karen. Thanks for sharing this. Valuable.
PS. Where did you get that weekly planner you use as a journal. I like the layout!!
I'm pretty sure that more than a few people are going to watch this and choose to not quit learning how to dance, as it can be super frustrating and seemingly impossible at first.